Posted by David Kopel: "Large Capacity Clips" and Police Officer Safety: http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_05_08-2005_05_14.shtml#1115910692
The Brady Campaign, the largest of the gun prohibition lobbies, is holding a press conference today to "discuss how police officer's jobs have become more dangerous since assault weapons with large capacity clips are more readily available." There's good reason to be skeptical about whatever claims the group will make. First of all, there are not many guns which actually use "clips" to store their ammunition. The venerable M-1 Garand from World War II used clips, but most guns of the last half-century store their ammunition in "magazines." And of course, the Brady Campaign's definition of "assault weapon" is almost infinitely elastic; the "assault weapon" bill which the group successfully pushed in New Jersey even banned some BB guns. The group's definition of "large" capacity magazines is also extreme. The now-expired 1994 federal gun ban defined "large" as anything over 10 rounds, even through millions of ordinary self-loading guns have a standard magazine capacity of 13-17 rounds. Notably, the group (under its previous name of "Handgun Control, Inc.") testified before the New York City Council in favor of banning any magazine holding more than 6 rounds. What about the group's mantra that "large" magazines endanger police officers? The group made a similar claim in 1995; as I detailed in an [1]article in Law Enforcement Trainer, the data from the study turned out to be extremely misleading. In truth, so-called "assault weapons" with "large" magazines are very rarely used in crimes of any sort, including crimes against police officers. References 1. http://www.davekopel.com/2A/OpEds/Are_Assault_Weapons_a_Threat_to_Police.htm _______________________________________________ Volokh mailing list [email protected] http://highsorcery.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
